An easier way to integrate Lotus Connections into Portal

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Amy Widmer, Quickr community leader and all-around awesome architect, sent me earlier today a presentation on a new WebAppIntegrator Portlet.  This portlet has been developed by the Lotus CTO's office and uses a rather unique approch to "integrate" Lotus Connections into a WebSphere Portal environment.  First, you should know that it doesn't use the Lotus Connection APIs.  Second, it doesn't use IFRAME.  So how does it work ?

The idea is that instead of adding Lotus Connections into Portal, we actually add Portal into Lotus Connections.  Let me explain.  This new portlet (available in about 3 weeks in the WebSphere Portlet Catalog) generates one line of JavaScript code that you insert into Lotus Connections.  Once you insert this one line of JavaScript into Lotus Connections, it dynamically changes the branding/look-n-feel of Lotus Connections.  This new look-n-feel is the same as the one for Portal.  Therefore, it's as if Lotus Connections was running inside Portal, but it's actually running separately!  Very cool!!

This approach is actually viable with customers and I know because that's what I did recently at a Large Automotive Customer.  The customer wanted to see how Lotus Connections would work with their existing Portal.  Thus, I rebranded Lotus Connections by changing a couple of CSS and JSP files.  Once I showed it to the customer, they thought I was running Lotus Connections inside of their portal, even though it was running completely independent.  Here's a slide from the presentation which shows how this portlet works.  I can't wait to see a demo of this portlet working!!

Microsoft buys a stake in Facebook -- now what?

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As you probably all know, Microsoft bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook last night. This valued the Facebook startup by another Hardvard-dropout at $15 billion dollars.  Maybe all these Harvard students have a big conspiracy, or maybe Microsoft is simply scared at IBM's Lotus Connections and this is the only way they can get in the game.  I'm sure it's a combination of the two ;) 

I'm a big Facebook user (but only after hours, never on company time). Now that this purchase has gone through, I'm sure many end-users, like myself, are wondering how secure is our data? Does Microsoft now have the right to crawl our data ?  Will they be able to develop some usage patterns based on what I've posted in my Facebook profile?  Or is the purchase simply a way to acquire the software and compete against IBM.  Sure Facebook can't compete entirely with Lotus Connections since it doesn't have all of the same features.  (At most I think it only competes against Profiles).

I'm sure we all know at this point that Microsoft is really bad at innovating.. but they are very good at copying software that already exists and making it prettier.  Should we be concerned, or rather, should the Lotus Connections development team be concerned about this acquisition.  Will Microsoft take the pretty UI from Facebook and make their own version of Lotus Connections?  I'm sure they'll take the angle "our UI is so much prettier -- and end-users know it already"!! And, of course, they won't talk about how our features are much better and richer.

One of the biggest advantages that I see in Facebook, compared to our product, is the easy plug-ability.  Microsoft has never been too keen on letting customers customize their products or integrate them with other stuff?  But maybe this is the beginning of a new era ?  Facebook has also proven that it's scalable, and we all know that Microsoft products aren't.  So is this another way for Microsoft to gain intellectual capital on how to build enterprise-ready, scalable solutions ?

1.6% is a small stake, so perhaps this is just an investment and nothing else... but still, there are so many unanswered questions...

P.S.  I recently saw a Microsoft document where it said that enterprise-ready software was software that could handle around 1,000 total users -- WHAT??  I think the smallest customer I've ever worked with had a total population of 7,000 employees!  And the biggest had 300,000 - now that's big; but I digress.

Social Software does ROCK!!

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Others have said it.  I have said it before.  It's true.  It's undeniable.  You really can't get away from it.  The power that it simply has is .....  undescribable.  "It freaks me out sometimes", as a co-worker says. How powerful is Lotus Connections?  Well here's another story that just happened minutes ago.

9:00am -  My work day starts and I have 23 new emails.  Not bad. (this should not be considerd as an excuse for you to start emailing me overnight :) )
9:10am -  One of the emails is from Ted Stanton, Product Manager for Lotus Connections.  In it he expresses the need to capture recommendations for possible IBM Redbooks on Lotus Connections.
9:11am -  I start composing an email to the community
9:24am -  I send an email to the community relaying Ted's message
10:30am - Barely 66 minutes after my email went out, I had already received 4 different responses!!  3 of them from people in Europe.  AND all responses were from people that I hadn't had an interaction before.

So I'm assuming our Asian counterparts are already in their comfy bed and won't see my email until tomorrow morning.  And for the ones in the Americas? They are probably still parsing through their new email from last night and will soon get back to me.

As I was writing this blog posting, my RSS reader (Google Desktop) notified me that Curtis Ryan, WW Sales Manager for Lotus Connections and co-leader for the Lotus Social Software community, had just written about Communities in the Enterprise.  Communities is making a splash today!

Social Software ROCKS!

Deploying Lotus Connections in a High-Scalability/High-Availability environment

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 Earlier today I got an email from a customer's IT Architect. He asked the following:

We are proposing to deploy Connections (all apps) across 3 data centers (3 Active Resilient Architecture) for the Portal/Connections RFP.    Could you please provide your input on the best way to architect the deployment of Connections across 3 sites?  For example, what are the ramifications of using a single database for say, Profiles or 3 separate Databases. If using 3 Databases, then how do we replicate?

I figured that this will be a question that will be in a lot of people's minds.  I wanted to capture my response in this blog for prosperity (and so that when someone else asks me this same question I can just direct them to this blog entry) :).  Anyway, here's my response:

This is actually pretty straightforward with WebSphere Network Deployment. And there are several approaches you can take as well. Since Connections is a J2EE application, all we need to do is set up WebSphere in a high-availability/high-scalability fashion. I've done this several times (not for Connections, but for other Lotus products that run on WebSphere).

You should probably take a look at this article first and this diagram:

The structure that I recommend is highlighted in this diagram:

Notes:

• Each part of the cluster will be on its own data center. For example, the Edge (standby) would be on a separate data center than where the normal Edge server is.
• We need to add a Caching Proxy in front of the Edge server (see figures above). The caching proxy would need to be set up in HA mode
• The slides only represent a cluster of two nodes just to show the idea.. imagine figure above with 3 boxes in each cluster
• I would rather have all application servers use the same database and have the database on hot standby and replicated via HACMP (see figures below). When one database fails, the other one picks up.
  • Alternatively, you can set the database requests to be sprayed using a DB sprayer such as Edge and have the databases replicated, again, via HACMP
• The slides don't show the LDAP. It's assumed that the customer already has a HA/HS solution for LDAP. If not, then you could set up a cluster of LDAP servers and use an IP Sprayer (Edge) to load balance the requests. Depending on the LDAP vendor, you'll need to figure out how to do the data replication.

More on WebSphere High Availability / High Scalability.

HACMP example:

Adding 'dogear this' button to your webpages

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Product development has made integration of Dogear with existing web applications even easier!!! Currently, you can add a 'dogear this' button to existing web pages by simply copying the bookmarlet code. The bookmarklet code is presented here:

var h='https://greenhouse.lotus.com/dogear'; var d=document; var b=d.body; var e=encodeURIComponent; var t=setTimeout; var dw; (function() { if(b){ a var p=d.createElement('script'); p.charset='UTF-8'; p.src=h+'/tools/blet.js'; b.appendChild(p); } t("var u=d.getElementById('dogear_postUrl'); if(u){ u=u.href; } else { u=h+'/post?url='+e(location.href)+'&title='+e(d.title); } dw=open(u+'&ver=0.9','dogear','toolbars=no,width=670,height=650'); if(!(dw==null||typeof(dw)=='undefined')){ dw.focus()}",250) } )()

Long, huh? Well, it's not that bad considering they give you the code and it's just a matter of copy-paste into all your webpages. If you are interested, this developerWorks article explains more on how to use the above code.

As of today, however, we have an even EASIER way to do this. And all it takes is two lines of code!! -- I promise, let's check it out.. First, add this line to your HTML's HEAD element:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://greenhouse.lotus.com/dogear/tools/doglink.js"></script>

Then, add this line to the <BODY> element of your web page (right now it's a DIV but you could make it a button if you wanted to...):

<a href="#" style="text-decoration:none;" onclick="DogLink.post_to_dogear(location.href, document.title, '', '');return false;"><IMG height=16 src="http://server.com/dogear/misc/favicon.gif" width=16 border=0>Bookmark this!</A>

Note: Updated 27/Apr/2009 to fix code as per comments

That's it!! Nifty, eh? This will be available to customers in the 1.0.2 release.